Tom writes:

> > A number of people, including HP itself, have been recently describing
>  > staying on the HP3000 indefinitely as being very risky. I disagree ...
>  > I've spent the day writing a general reply as a web page at:
>  >     http://aics-research.com/planb.html
>
>  Just playing devil's advocate here :) but I noticed you sprinkled the
phrase
>  "for the next 25 years" liberally throughout the page.  While I realize "25
>  years" is one of those "nice, round numbers", it isn't as "round" as say 30
>  or 50...
>
>  (in other words, I too can add 25 to 2002 and come up with 2027, MPE's
"y2k"
>  event... ;) )
>
>  (and yes, I know, MPE has a whole slew of new intrinsics to extend the
>  internal date format for well beyond the rest of our natural [or even
>  unnatural] lives, but what guarantee will we have that the final release of
>  MPE will have ALL internal date-related functions converted to the new
>  intrinsics/data storage formats?)

Conspiracy theories abound, eh? :-)

I didn't choose 25 years to coincide with the 2027 date. That was just an
accident. Rather, I simply picked a date out of the air as an exemplar outer
limit that an organization might want to run on obsolete hardware and an
orphaned O/S -- if no Open MPE movement or emulator comes to exist.

But even if those latter conditions never do come true, a primary moral that
was implicit in my posting is that you don't have to make up your mind on
what you're going to do in the next 6 to 18 months. If you are a part of an
organization where staying on the HP3000 is very real consideration and makes
good sense, you realistically have 10 to 15 years to decide. There's simply
no reason to be rushed into your decision.

A lot of things will disappear from the HP3000's "ecosystem," most notably HP
itself. But many things will stay the same too. We haven't been on support
from HP for 20 years now, and because of that, the disappearance of HP will
hardly change our world over the next 20 years.

In the past, I simply haven't felt that support was necessary, especially
with friends like Rene Woc, Stan Sieler and Steve Cooper. I suspect that that
kind of co-dependence will only grow as the community shrinks. However, in
favor of such a way of life, let me say that my support level could not have
been any better. I get almost instantaneous and authoritative answers to all
of my questions, and when we have had hardware failures, we've never been
down but for a few minutes.

One of the great advantages of a relatively simple (and highly reliable)
system is its ease of maintenance.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *